Don't buy any video converter before trying this freebie

THERE IS open source software to perform almost every task. But Windows users always expect a fancy graphical
interface.

"SUPER" provides just that, allowing you to
effortlessly convert video files between every format, for free.

The open source
ffmpeg converter is awesome, supporting almost every video
and audio codec on Earth. But like every other linux program it's a command line application -also known as "text mode"
back in the old DOS days. Command line applications are very powerful, giving programmers and code hackers plenty of
simplicity - you can pipe the output from one program to another in the traditional Unix fashion, run it as a web
server task via CGI, you name it.

But for the end user, it also means that the current generation of windows "button clickers" feel left out. Not
anymore. I found a nice windows graphical user interface dubbed "Super" which includes compiled windows executables of
ffmpeg, MPLAYER, ffmpeg2theora along with other related open source libraries into a simple installer for it. The
result is "Super", described, pardon the redundancy, as "A simple GUI to ffmpeg, mencoder, mplayer, x264, mppenc,
ffmpeg2theora & the theora/vorbis RealProducer plugIn".

Point-and-click access to ffmpeg, mencoder and ffmpeg2theora, from Windows

Translated to English, this means you to convert back and forth between AVI, WMV, ASF, Realvideo, Quicktime, OGG
Theora, even the latest video file formats like .3gp used on mobile phones from Nokia/NEC/Siemens/Sony Ericsson etc.
All is done with just a few clicks, as the gui launches the requested open sauce in the background. And everything for
free, to boot. Before my surprise encounter with "Super" I was testing several shareware trials, and almost settled on
the commercial program "WinAVI video converter", which while
promising, now feels expensive and limited in
comparison. Of course, with the freeware GUI for the open source encoders, you get no support, so keep that in
mind.

Windows builds of the command-line executables are in there, of course.
Those are just called in the backgroun

I have successfully used this GUI to convert -using ffmpeg- from the proprietary "Flash Video" format -FLV- to MPEG4
AVIs using the open source
XVid codec, a binary of which you can download
over here, it worked very well. Conversion from the
proprietary ASF and WMV formats to the open MPEG1 to play back on my
Prismiq
Media Player on the telly, also worked well.

The only drawbacks? When you start using it you wonder where your converted files went. Well, it's easy, move the
mouse pointer over the "Super" program window and right click, there's a pop-up menu, and one of its options is
"Specify the Output Folder Destination". Also, selecting "Mencoder" as the conversion engine did not provide good
results in one of my tests, so I switched to ffmpeg for the rest of the testing. And finally, this program will try to
access the internet to find out if there are newer versions, you can simply block that request with your personal
firewall application and make it a permanent rule, if you wish so. The program will work just fine, even without
internet access.

Playing back a FLV video converted to a Xvid AVI in VLC Media Player

Now that I'm speaking about video formats, I highly encourage everyone to have the
VLC media player from VideoLan.org installed into every system (it's open
source, and of course free 'as in free beer', and available
for
Windows, for
Linux, and for
MacOS-X) as well. It includes support for formats like
H.264, FLV, Quicktime, Vorbis and Theora, and also relies heavily on
ffmpeg. If you're comfortable without formal paid support,
with the VLC Media Player plus the free "Super" grphical front end for ffmpeg installed, there's really little reason
to buy a video format converter application.µ